It's a scene that plays out all the time in student newspapers across the country: An inexperienced reporter hands in a sloppily written and thinly reported story to a similarly inexperienced editor who has barely learned the basics of AP Style.

You can guess what happens next - the subpar article gets published in the paper with little in the way of changes that might have made it better. The reporter and the editor both end up looking bad.

Of course, the reporter should have done a better job, but ultimately it's the editors who decide what gets published. In cases like these, young editors, even those who know their AP Style and are good at cleaning up messy copy, often lack the confidence to do what I call aggressive editing.

What is aggressive editing? It's the kind of editing that entails doing whatever is necessary to make a story worth publishing, even if that means rewriting the damn thing from start to finish.

The problem is, many journalism students imagine that the editing process involves little more than fine-tuning a story, tweaking a sentence, fixing a grammar problem there, and so on.

That may be the case at big-name newspapers with stables of marquee writers, but at the typical high school or college paper, reporters are learning their trade as they go, which means that many of the stories that come across copy desks are, well, train wrecks.

Buried ledes. Bad grammar. Misspelled words. You get the idea.

Given that so many stories submitted to student papers are bound to be of, shall we say, less than publishable quality, student editors must be up to the task of taking on such disasters.

And yes, that means knowing AP Style, having a command of proper grammar and so on. But most of all it means having the confidence to tear a story apart and put it back together again, even if that means that the end result looks nothing like the original article.

So here are some tips for doing aggressive editing:

Unearth the lede: Beginning reporters often make the mistake of burying the lede, putting the most newsworthy information in their story somewhere around the eighth paragraph. An editor must find the story's real lede and put it where it belongs - at the top.

Untangle snarled writing: In an effort to make their stories sound more important, student journalists often write awkward and confusing sentences that make absolutely no sense. The editor has to untangle that mess of words and produce copy that's simple, clear and straightforward.

Get me rewrite: Sometimes cleaning up sloppy copy just isn't enough. Sometimes stories have to be totally rewritten, which means an editor must turn into a rewriteman (or woman). A good editor has to decide when this is necessary, and if it is, to plunge ahead fearlessly. And don't worry about hurting the reporter's feelings. Feelings? In the news business? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Keep it concrete: Raised on years of English classes, newby reporters have a tendency to make broad generalizations in their stories without backing them up with actual statistics or statements from experts. The editor has to yank such generalizations from the story, or send the article back to the reporter to do more reporting.

More facts, please: The great thing about the Internet is that it's usually fairly easy to double-check a broad array of facts and figures on many topics. If an editor finds a statement in a story that doesn't sound right, it's up to her to check it on a reputable website.

AP Style? Check: Getting your AP Style right is simple - just check the Stylebook. Yes, it can be tedious, but get used to it because that's an important part of editing. On the other hand, if a reporter who turned in a story that's full of AP Style errors is nearby, grab him, sit him down with a Stylebook. and make him fix the story.

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